Chapter 63: The Benefits of Grandpa’s Tricks
Arriving at the equipment room, they found a group of boys gathered inside. Some were testing their grip strength, while others were testing their lung capacity.
When Chen Mo came in, Tian Jing called him over, ready to get a good look at his grip strength and lung capacity stats.
Especially his lung capacity.
High lung capacity provides a boost to both long-distance running and sprinting.
Chen Mo remembered his lung capacity had been pretty high back in high school.
The students who went before him had already finished their tests. The highest scores belonged to a few student athletes, who scored a little over 5,000.
Chen Mo knew a few tricks for the lung capacity test, which would help get a more accurate reading.
With his classmates watching, he started by exhaling at a steady pace. As he breathed out, the numbers on the monitor began to jump rapidly.
One thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand...
The other students usually started exhaling faster once they passed 3,000, feeling like they were about to run out of breath. Most of them ended up with scores between 4,000 and 5,000.
Chen Mo only began his final push after passing 4,000. The boys around him held their breath, staring at the flashing red numbers on the digital screen.
Zhao Yuanyuan was pressed against the window, her nose squashed into a comical, flat circle on the glass.
"Sixty-eight hundred! Seven thousand!"
When the number finally stopped at 6980, a chorus of curses erupted throughout the equipment room.
The grip tester in Zhang Ji’s hand fell to the mat with a CLATTER, startling two sparrows into flight outside the window.
Tian Jing’s ballpoint pen poked a small hole through the registration sheet. She had to double-check that her eyes weren’t playing tricks on her. A score of 4,000 was already excellent for a normal high school student, and 5,000 was the standard for student athletes. Chen Mo’s score, however, was comparable to that of a professional swimmer.
"Dude, you got a turbocharger in your lungs or something?" Huang Mao’s fist slammed into Chen Mo’s arm, making him stagger back half a step.
The reason Chen Mo had such high lung capacity was all thanks to a movie he watched as a child.
The star, known as the "Kung Fu Emperor," had a breath-holding contest with the child actor playing his son, both of them dunking their heads into a basin full of water.
This inspired Chen Mo to do the same, and he often challenged his grandfather to breath-holding contests.
He lost to his grandfather every single time. Determined to win, Chen Mo would push himself to the absolute limit before finally pulling his head out of the water.
Only later did he discover that his grandfather had been cheating. His grandpa would keep his face just above the water and only dunk his head in right before Chen Mo was about to come up for air.
So every time Chen Mo came up gasping for air and wiped the water from his eyes, he would see his grandfather still holding his breath, as steady as a rock.
Seeing how powerful his grandfather was, little Chen Mo had worshipped him.
It wasn’t until his grandmother exposed his grandfather’s little trick that Chen Mo realized he had been duped for years.
But it was precisely because of his grandfather’s little trick that he had an opponent he could never defeat, giving him the motivation to always challenge his limits.
Otherwise, he would have won on the very first day and likely wouldn’t have been so dedicated to improving his breath-holding time.
Over time, his grandfather’s little trick ended up increasing his lung capacity.
It brought him immense benefits as he grew up.
’Of course, he didn’t blame his grandpa for tricking him.’
After seeing Chen Mo’s lung capacity, Tian Jing’s eyes lit up.
’He’s a prime candidate for long-distance running. His technique is solid, his physical condition is excellent, and his lung capacity is off the charts.’
’Most importantly,’ Tian Jing thought, ’Chen Mo has this kind of talent without any professional training. If he were professionally trained, he’d be unstoppable!’
This strengthened her resolve to have a talk with He Xiaoyun.
Not long after Chen Mo finished his lung capacity test, the bell rang, signaling the end of class.
"All right, class is dismissed. You can go rest for now. For those of you who still didn’t pass after the extra practice, try to find some time at home to keep working out using the methods I taught you."
"This isn’t just about passing the fitness test. As the saying goes, a healthy body is a revolutionary’s greatest asset. Taking care of your physical health will only do you good!"
Once Tian Jing finished her final instructions, the students began to head back. The girls went to the locker room to change back into their school uniforms.
The last period of the day was English. Most of the students had little interest in it. Chen Mo, however, was fine since he could understand most of it. Of all the subjects, it was the one he was least likely to forget.
After all, once a language is learned, it’s learned.
Even though there weren’t many opportunities to use it, Chen Mo had found occasions to practice it in the past.
But for the average student, there was just too much to memorize and understand: grammar, subjects, predicates, objects... It was especially easy to get the parts of a sentence mixed up when dealing with nested clauses, like adjective or adverbial clauses.
Combining different tenses and voices—like mixing the subjunctive mood, passive voice, and perfect tense—often led to confusing sentence structures.
Abstract concepts like non-finite verbs—using participles as adverbs or gerunds as subjects—felt disconnected from any real-world context, making them easy to mix up through rote memorization.
On top of that, without a proper environment to practice in, learning the language was incredibly difficult.
On days when the English teacher supervised the evening study hall, she would declare it "English Night." On those nights, students were only allowed to communicate in English to improve their speaking skills and vocabulary retention.
Even so, the improvement in everyone’s English grades was still relatively limited.
Those who were interested or persistent managed to learn, but for everyone else, it was like trying to understand gibberish.
For Chen Mo, it didn’t matter if he paid attention or not; it was just a review session. Huang Mao, on the other hand, just put his head down and went straight to sleep.
Su Yuqing, meanwhile, was studying as hard as she could. Zhao Yuanyuan appeared to be focused, but her dazed expression revealed she was actually zoning out.
The English period seemed to fly by for both the attentive and the inattentive students.
The diligent students felt class ended before they could grasp the material. The slackers felt the time passed in a blink, especially the ones who were sleeping—some had even started to drool.
After all, they had just had a strenuous PE class, which made sleeping through this period feel especially satisfying.
The final bell for the afternoon finally rang. Everyone stretched and got ready to head out for dinner.
They still had evening study hall tonight. The supervising teacher was the chemistry teacher, Li Yan.
He was such a nice guy that the students weren’t afraid of him, so discipline in his class could be a bit lax at times.
Still, when he did speak up to restore order, the students would show him some respect.
But it wouldn’t be long before the quiet slowly gave way to chatter again.
As the bell rang, Su Yuqing suddenly froze in her seat, looking a bit dazed.
Zhao Yuanyuan saw this and was about to say something, but Chen Mo put a finger to his lips and waved for her to go on ahead without them.
Although she didn’t know what was going on, Zhao Yuanyuan nodded obediently and left the classroom.
She kept looking back as she walked, curious about what was suddenly wrong with Su Yuqing.
As the students filed out, the classroom was finally empty except for Chen Mo and Su Yuqing.